Albert and Annie Rose both died in August 1936.
They died in St Pancras Hospital, where they had been taken because they
were sick. Their funerals left from outside their flat in Herbert Street,
Kentish Town, with black horses with nodding black feathers drawing the
hearses. (The one thing most working class people saved up for was a
respectable funeral).

Annie and Albert had lived in this two room flat
since they were married. They brought up eight children in those rooms and
then looked after some of the grandchildren. When they died Annie was about
74 and Albert eighty.

Since retiring they had been able to keep paying the
rent because both received an old age pension. But such pensions were only
introduced, after a long campaign, by the
1908 Old Age Pensions
Act. This
Act has been described, by Brian Watkin, as the first step in replacing the
"hated poor law", of 1834, by the "welfare state" (Watkin 1975 p.71).

If
Annie and Albert had grown old before 1908, they would have spent their
retirement years in a workhouse. In the workhouse Annie would have lived in
dormitories with the other women, and Albert with the other men. They would
have been allowed out for part of the day to meet one another. As it was,
the workhouse had become St Pancras Hospital (the one they died in) and
Annie and Albert only went into it when they were sick.

Inglis 1972
has this picture of a workhouse yard at about the time that
Annie was in one.

It looks rather like a prison yard. But a workhouse was
not a prison. People were free to leave at any time - but if they did they
stopped receiving state benefit, they had to find their own food, lodgings
and clothes. The picture is of the women's yard. Men and women were
strictly separated. Some of the women have young children with them, but
the women were only allowed to keep their children for the first few years
(until they were about five), then the children were taken away and kept in
another part of the workhouse. In the picture a young girl is holding her
mother's hand and pointing upwards, and her mother is looking in the
direction the child is pointing. If you follow the line of the child's
pointing finger you can see that a man is peering through a gridiron high
in a wall. He has climbed up on something in the men's yard and is peering
into the women's yard. I like to think of him as Annie's father, trying to
catch sight of his wife and daughter.

Workhouses were meant to be hated -
they were intended to deter people from claiming benefit - and the part
that
the poor hated most was the way that families were split up.

The two principle developments he made of the idea
were a scheme for a
model prison at Millbank, and a scheme for
a
network of
private workhouses. Neither scheme materialised, although the foundations
of Millbank were laid according to Bentham's plan, and a prison was erected
on the site by other people.

The principle of the panopticon was the all
seeing eye (which is more or less what the word means). The supervisor
would be able to see everything that inmates were doing, and inmates would
never know that they were not being watched. Constant surveillance would,
Bentham thought, remove the need for punishment. The inmates would behave
because they knew that they could not get away with anything!
(Bahmueller
1981 p.155). In practice, the principle of the all seeing eye
was applied
mostly to
lunatic
asylums.
Workhouses constructed under the 1834 Act were
not built on the panopticon principle because they were primarily meant for
deterrence, not reform. The people they were supposed to change were not
the people inside, but the ones outside. The workhouse was meant to be a
place that deterred people from claiming relief.

(¶10)
Utilitarianism is a moral theory that claims "good"
is what avoids pain and maximizes pleasure. The variety of utilitarianism
that dominated social science in 19th century Britain is often called
Benthamism after
Jeremy Bentham, whose
panopticon scheme was a practical
application of his general theory that principles should be applied to
social policy. He said that the guide for good legislation should be the
"greatest
happiness
of the greatest number"
and believed that society can
be restructured to maximize the universal or public interest and minimize
"sinister" private interests. In the pursuit of happiness, individuals
following their personal ends could defeat one another's purposes. The
object of a scientific social policy should be to encourage acts that
enhance the general happiness and deter those that do not. The object of
good legislation, according to Bentham, is to maximise human happiness.

(¶11)
Hobbes
and
Locke
were state of nature
theorists. This means that their social science was based on imagining
humans stripped of social characteristics (in a state of nature) and
working out how society came about through a social contract or agreement
between the individuals.

Robert Filmer
and
David Hume
thought that, as
history has no record of an original social contract, it is unscientific to
build theories on it.

Jean Jacques
Rousseau
however, in The Social
Contract (1762), thought even a fictitious concept was a useful tool
for analysing society.

Nowadays many social scientists accept the idea of
useful fictions.
Max Weber,
for example, constructed ideal types:
hypothetical constructions modeled on some aspect of reality (e.g.
contract) which though not existing in the pure form, have explanatory
value.

But 19th century British theorists wanted a less abstract, more
concrete social science. For most of them, this was provided by the
utilitarianism founded by Jeremy Bentham. Bentham insisted that a fiction
could not be useful to science. In his first book,
A Fragment on
Government, in
1776, he
wrote

"As to the Original Contract...I was in
hopes...that this chimera had been effectually demolished by Mr Hume...in
the third volume of his Treatise on Human Nature". "We no longer
need
the sandy foundation of a fiction... there was once a time, perhaps, when
they had their use....But the season of Fiction is now over....To
prove fiction...there is need of fiction; but it is the characteristic of
truth to need no proof but truth."

Real social science had to be based on the idea that we pursue
ends which are useful to us because they maximise the happiness we
experience and minimise the pain. For Bentham and his followers, social
science is a way of looking behind the explanations (fictions) that human
beings give for their actions, to discover the real reasons in terms of
pain avoidance and pleasure seeking. It is a practical science, because if
science can analyze the real motives of human behaviour, laws can be
designed that encourage citizens to behave in the way that maximises the
sum of their pleasures, and minimises the pains. In Bentham's words, laws
could be constructed to achieve
"the greatest
happiness of the greatest number".

By the early 19th
century all this had changed. Political economists were so pessimistic
about the future of the nation's wealth, and the possibility of the poor
getting any richer, that Thomas Carlyle called political economy the
"gloomy science".

"in almost every other race
of animals each individual, when it is grown up to maturity, is entirely
independent.

However, the interdependence of adult human beings is not by
the same means as humans and animals use in childhood. It is by exchange,
not begging.

"A puppy fawns upon its dam....Man sometimes uses the same arts
with his brethren, and ...endeavours by every servile and fawning attention
to obtain their good will. He has not time, however, to do this upon every
occasion....Man has almost constant occasion for the help of his brethren,
and it is in vain for him to expect it from their benevolence only. He will
be more likely to prevail if he can interest their self-love in his favour,
and show them that it is for their own advantage to do for him what he
requires of them....It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the
brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to
their own interest. ...Nobody but a beggar chooses to depend chiefly upon
the benevolence of his fellow-citizens".
(Smith, A. 1776,
book
1, chapter
2)

He says this in the chapter on
"the principle which gives
occasion to the
division of labour"
in which exchange is presented as the foundation of the
social organism, at least as far as its economic well-being is concerned. A
prosperous society is built on exchange. Smith describes to us a world wide
network of exchange, that we could never have constructed consciously,
creating the complex division of labour that makes the wealth of nations
possible. It could have been a very short step from imagining healthy
societies growing out of the pursuit of selfish ends, to imagining
benevolence, and consequently the poor laws, as an unhealthy, malignant
growth. Smith did not take that step, some of his followers did.

An example of the limited free-market criticism of
the poor law is Smith's criticism of the
law of
settlement.
The Elizabethan poor
law required that someone claiming relief should do so in the
parish
where they were born. This was seen by Smith and his followers as a
restraint on free trade. Economic theory treats labour as a commodity that
can be bought and sold. It is argued that labour should be free to move to
where the work is. So, today, if coal mines close down, miners should be
free to move to an area of the country where there are other jobs - if they
can find one. But if, when you become unemployed, you are forced to move
back to the place where you were born, it is unlikely that will be the
place where jobs are available. Smith, therefore, wanted the poor law
modified so that unemployed people could claim benefit where they lived,
rather than where they were born.

According to Malthus, we can never reach a condition of well-being, with
plenty for all, because our numbers will always tend to increase more
rapidly than our means of subsistence. The reason for this is the human
sexual drive, and, in particular, its insatiability in the male. Malthus's
law was that population increases much faster than subsistence unless
checked by misery or vice. Misery included things like famine and war. In
practice, Malthus argued, the most potent check was the higher infant
mortality in families where provisions are short. Vice is not so clearly
defined, but two practices he probably thought of as vices limiting
population are prostitution and birth control. Prostitution channels the
sexual drives of men away from their wives, birth control stops their wives
having babies. Neither was considered morally acceptable at the time.

In his
second edition
Malthus added moral restraint to the possible checks on population.
The main form that this could take was late marriages, without having sex
outside marriage. The reason that Malthus only had two types of check in
his first edition appears to be that he doubted the willingness of men to
live without sex - if late marriages meant men frequenting prostitutes,
then
all checks could be counted as either misery or vice.

(¶22)
Although a gloomy essay, it was very popular, because it appeared at the
height of anti French feeling in Britain
(Halevy 1913, Part 3; Chapter 2,
Section 16). People who could afford to buy books were pleased to find
scientific reasons why the French ideas about reorganizing society to make
it rational, would not work. With respect to the poor laws, its
implications were clear. If people had to work hard for a living the pain
of the work might deter them from the pleasures of sex: in an effort to
restrict the number of mouths they had to feed from their work. But if the
poor were given welfare by the state whenever they were hungry, nothing
would deter them from breeding like rabbits and they would breed until the
country's resources were exhausted and famine and disease began to curb
their numbers. In the long run, it was no kindness to the poor to provide
for their welfare other than by the free market for their labour.

"Wages should be left to the fair and free competition of the market and
should never be controlled by the interference of the legislature. The
clear and direct tendency of the poor laws is in direct opposition to these
obvious principles"

"Instead of making the poor rich, they are calculated to make the rich
poor".

He even suggested that the poor law

"could progressively
increase till it has absorbed all the net revenue of the country

"No scheme
for the amendment of the poor laws merits the least attention which has not
their abolition for its ultimate object."

Ricardo did not provide the theory
to support his assertions. He simply pointed out that it had already been
provided by Malthus. The "pernicious tendency" of the law was

"no longer a
mystery, since it has been fully developed by the able hand of Mr Malthus;
and every friend of the poor must ardently wish for their abolition"
(Ricardo 1817, Chapter 5 On Wages page 61)

In the 1817 version, Owen
envisaged the unemployed finding work in villages of co-operation.
Cooperation, as opposed to individualism, had economic and moral
advantages. He believed collective activities would be more efficient, but
he also argued that the influence of individualism is towards ignorance and
brutality and that of cooperation towards liveliness and intelligence. He
contrasted the "brutal selfishness" of individualism with the "rational
self-interest" of co-operation, which recognizes the individual's own
interest in the welfare of the community. Owen claimed that

Abolition was soon recognised as
impossible but, during the next few years, an amalgam of utilitarianism and
laissez-faire ideas was developed that modified laissez-faire principles by
saying that government needed to be an active manipulator of pains and
pleasures if the free market was to thrive. It was this broader science
that was eventually applied to the reform of the poor laws. The poor law
was retained, but modified in a way that took account of the laissez-faire
criticisms, and Benthamism provided an alternative to abolition that was
consistent with free market principles.

1) Egoistic psychology,
which is the kind of psychology that Hobbes developed. This argues that the
foundation of any explanation of the human mind must be to trace its
content back to the self-centred desires of the individual. In 1829 James
Mill published one of the first English text books on psychology.

2) Democracy. He argued that if we are all pursuing our own
self-interest
it is not safe to trust government to a minority. Every male adult must
have a vote to act as a control on the government. He wrote a very
influential article in the Encyclopedia Britannica to argue this
point
(James Mill 1820 & 1825)

3) Laissez-faire economics. He linked
together the theories of Bentham and those of Ricardo, Malthus and other
followers of Adam Smith. (James Mill 1821-1822)

Later,
Harriet
Taylor
and James Mill's son,
John Stuart Mill
modified laissez-faire and utilitarianism enough for some people to think
of them as forerunners of Labour Party socialism. They too incorporated
ideas from Owen and other socialists (Mill, J.S. 1848, and subsequent
editions).

In mid-Victorian Britain John Stuart Mill was probably the most
influential social scientist. In the 1830s, however, it was James Mill's
version of utilitarianism which most people would have recognised.

This is saying that one needs a balance of pain and pleasure that will lead
to people doing what is socially desirable. If there is more pleasure and
less pain in being on social security than in working, Bentham says, people
will stop working. The implication for social policy is that being on
social security should be made less eligible (less desirable) than working.

The
1834 Poor Law Act
established a Poor Law Commission; not a Royal
Commission of Inquiry, but an administrative department. Bentham's one-time
secretary,
Edwin
Chadwick, was appointed as the Commission Secretary and
Halevy credits him with much of the responsibility for the centralisation
and bureaucratization of English government in the following years.
Chadwick, he says, was

"a determined opponent of the aristocratic self-
government which prevailed in England and a zealot for uniformity and
administrative centralisation."
(Halevy 1927
part one, chapter 2, section
3.1, p.100)

Social security was not the only central government department
that
Chadwick helped to found. After his Report on the Sanitary
Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain, in 1842,
he went on (1848 to 1854) to pioneer a
Board of
Health.

In 1841 Thomas Wakley
MP was whistling into the wind when he described to parliament his vision
of a social security system based on rights which supported elderly people
in homes where their dignity was respected
(Hansard
28.9.1841).
Wakley drew
on paternalist theories of the relation between classes. He hoped that
parliament would replace the law that

"originated with a set of Utilitarians"

with laws that should

"cause the working men of this country to teach their
sons that the gentry were their friends and benefactors....If this were
done there would be no fear of midnight conspiracy or crime, nor would any
tremble through the night...."
(Hansard
28.9.1841).
col.978).

Shortly after
this, the utilitarian
John Stuart Mill
began a campaign against
paternalism. He attacked the idea that the working class should be
politically submissive in exchange for welfare benefits. In this context,
he defended the 1834 poor law as an Act that encouraged the independence of
the poor
(Mill, J.S.
1845).

The
idea of freedom that Taylor and Mill developed was one of self-
determination as an essential part of being human. It was better, they
argued, to be a woman who could determine her own future, even in tough
conditions, than to be a pampered pet whose husband made all the decisions.

"definite right to the primal needs of a civic life on the
basis of mutual obligations as between the individual and the community"
(Hobhouse 1913 p.225 quoted Fletcher 1971 p.193).

Hobhouse was theorising
the welfare state. Social science, as it always has, continued to shape the
lives of ordinary people in their most intimate details. Which is one of
the reasons that my great-grandparents, Annie and Albert, had a pension.